The design complexity and high-performance computing requirements of modern integrated circuit devices such as system-on-a-chip (SOC) devices and graphics processing unit (GPU) devices continues to increase.
Functional safety standard ISO26262 ASIL (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) specifies functional safety standards for electronic components used in autonomous automotive applications. In-system tests may be carried out using logic built-in self-tests (LBIST) and memory built-in self-tests (MBIST). MBIST may be used for example to test on-chip memory arrays of SOCs, GPUs, and other integrated circuit devices. Traditional in-field application tests utilize functional patterns that have long development cycles and that are difficult to quantify. Traditional in-field application test patterns may require many development iterations. Generation of such test patterns is expensive and tends to incur high execution latency.
Depending on a number of factors the device utilized in a particular implementation may be configured into many different functional versions, herein called SKUs, where each SKU is a particular configuration of a more generic functional design. Factors affecting a SKU configuration include the target implementation power and functional requirements, customer preferences, and level of functional autonomy desired for the part in the implementation (e.g., in an autonomous automotive application).
In order to have the widest applicability, a SOC, GPU, or other device may be designed generally to be configurable to support many different SKUs. Not all circuits or features of the device may be operational in a particular SKU. A device configured into a particular SKU may thus include both functional regions and non-functional regions. The non-functional regions may be turned off in the field, for example to save power, enabling the use of a single generic functional design configurable for different power budgets and costs.